Automatic Synonym and Phrase Replacement Show Promise for Style Transformation

Style transformation refers to the process by which a piece of text written in a certain style of writing is transformed into another text exhibiting a distinctly different style of writing without significant change to the meaning of individual sentences. In this paper we continue investigation into the linguistic style transformation problem and demonstrate current achievements in transformation on sample texts from a standard authorship attribution corpus. Specifically, we use simple synonym and phrase replacement on the source text to strengthen the stylistic markers of a given target corpus. We validate our results using Java Graphical Authorship Attribution Program (JGAAP). We are able to demonstrate that simple replacements can alter the linguistic style of writing as detected by an independent process.